I need a vacation. A long, long, long sunny and not windy or cold or frosted, but not exactly snowing-vacation...near a beach with a wide assortment of alcoholic beverages, and maybe a thick book. Yes...some reading and drinking...and if a bikini-clad woman were to lounge next to me, I'd accept her company...with opened arms. It's been a while since I had a day off work. Here's how annoying it gets when you've worked as much as I have, with no relief, and bare with me - I realize my job isn't what most people might call hard or, in a better adjective, excruciating; I'd describe what I do as a walk in the park. But it's the attitude I get from the people who come in, or simply, the amount of the same people I have to see every day of my life, that gets me down. The same caliber of people I have to see every day...EVERY DAY, those same buffoons come in here, do the same thing on the computer as the day before...people, do you not have anything better to do with your time!? So again, as an example of how trite this job can be, last night I was supposed to chill with a few of my friends, and I didn't get to because I fell asleep at like 8:30-9 p.m. That is absurd! I couldn't keep my eyes open that early in the night, and so regardless of how many times my friends tried to get a hold of me, I was out! My one break away from work and doing nothing, and work, and coming back home and being so bored I just stare at a television to pass the time, was ruined because I was so, either exhausted from my mundane atmosphere or quiescent by the stupidity of these people. I think my mind was fried. I mentioned above in this somewhat-similar-to-all-my-posts-diatribe that I'd rather take a vacation, away from all this vexatious shit; I have plenty of stuff I'd rather do than babysit these adults! I need to explore my calming center...that sounded really gay.
TV Land has been rerunning episodes of The Cosby Show at about 10 or 11 o'clock at night. That's a fantastic show to fall asleep to. I caught it on the network about three days ago, and can't get enough of it. About a year or so ago, any time I just wanted to veg or chill to the television, while channel-surfing, I'd miraculously come across The Cosby Show on like Nick at Nite (I think it was Nick @ Nite) Aside from the ridiculous Cosby sweaters, and his goofy, shuffling dancing at the beginning of each episode, the show is just so chalk-full of heart! YAY! Actually, Bill Cosby is very funny in his role as Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable; this was still before he became embittered by the death of his only son, and became the douche bag he is today, demanding a lapse of violence and sexuality in all forms of media, particularly television and video games. I'm almost willing to go out and buy The Cosby Show on DVD, considering at Target I can get the entire series for like $70. Just depends if I want to spend $70 on something I can watch on cable for free.
What else? I never have anything good to talk about. Which is why I'm so quiet if I go out to dinner with people, or go over to someones house where people I know are at, chilling. Or, if I run in to someone out-and-about and we get to talking, I'm always the one shaking my head in agreement or going, "uh-huh...uh-huh...yeah, that's true....really!?" like I'm actually fucking shocked; "Really!? You don't say!" The bad that comes with that is I then sound like I'm uninterested in what the other person is talking about or I seem distracted. Folks, that's my A.D.D. kicking in, and my lack of social skills; I'm sociable, but I've also been flung bullshit all day while at work, and had to deal with some pretty crappy people, so bare with me if I don't speak up. Like, for instance, about a week ago, I went over to a friend's house and my friend's sister - my friend wasn't there at the time - her sister decided to color a 'Welcome Home' dangling banner, with the letters 'Welcome Home' or whatever the fuck it said, dangling and separate from one another. Good for her, right? Wrong. Everyone in the room had to color a letter, now, I don't know about you, but coloring or doing anything creative, being forced in to doing creative-things is not my favorite thing to do. Especially after I had to work. But there was no talking my way out of this one, and arguing seemed trivial, so I sucked it up, grabbed a letter, and went to town, as the saying goes. Only my way-to-town was through a briar patch, or in sensible-terms, I was thoroughly stumped on how I wanted to decorate my letter. In fact, my friend's mom even noted that I looked stumped. So, instead of coloring, I just drew a slack-jawed, whimsical character I refer to as "The Rambling Man" peeking over the letter 'O'. And that ended my participation in coloring letters for a banner. Again, not that I didn't care, I was inebriated and unable to be sparked by creativity. As we all attempted to start a conversation, our attempts were futile. I had nothing interesting to say, and it didn't seem right for the parents of my friend to carry all of the conversation - it got awkward.
I'm amazed I've been able to supply this blog with a post just about every month! I was thinking about how stupid people are any more. Like this morning, I had a guy come in who wanted headphones while he "worked"/played around on the computer. See, we rent out headphones as well. The only problem is, like everything you give other people, they break it, or in this sense, break the headphones. The funny thing is, we have a whole cabinet to the back of the room full of the headphones we use. I tell people whenever I run out of headphones that they will have to wait until someone returns a pair, when in fact, they could have a pair of headphones right now if I wasn't lazy and didn't want to walk over to the cabinet to grab a few pairs. What made this incident "stupid" was what the guy said to me when I told him I didn't have a pair of headphones for him to rent. He asked, how could I run out of headphones? And I told him I had a limited amount of headphones to give out, and all of my pairs are in use at the moment. He then said, that's dumb...you need to buy more headphones then..., where, upon him saying that, I thought, no, what you need to do is bring your own headphones with you if you are planning on using them with one of our computers. This fuck is so acclimated to using a pair of our headphones that, once we ran out of them like we did today, he wasn't satisfied without headphones. Let's do a little math to further ridicule this creature; each day he comes in and gives me a quarter for headphones. If he were to come in for seven days straight, or a full-week, he has spent a $1.75 on headphones alone. And he's a regular, so tally that up for a month, that's $7 a month. He could have bought his own headphones, headphones only he is using, headphones that will always be there and never taken by another person, we hope, and we need to buy more headphones...but I don't tell him that.
Some of our practices here in the lab, and by that I mean our list of rules we have compiled, have different variations in other fields of work, but otherwise, they are unique. We have a 60-70 page report just on people we've had to warn for unacceptable behavior. A lot of the people on that list are repeat offenders. We have an equally compromising not-paid list. There's a person in here now, no matter who you are, if he sees you coming up to him, he says hello. Doesn't matter that it's the fifth or sixth time I have had to come up to him, to either give him a pair of headphones that have just become available or to tell him his time is up, each time a person comes up to him, it's hello. And it's not because he's nice; he's just weird, but has a good attitude on life. A lot of these people who come in I know on a first and last name-basis; now that's sad, and it's all because they come in so often. Whenever we have a problem-patron come in, and our newest employee is unsure of who it is, they come to me. Because I've seen them all, dealt with them all, know how to deal with them, hate to deal with them, but don't have a choice in the matter. All it takes are a few haphazard descriptions from a co-worker of how the person acted or looked, and I'll instantly know who they are talking about. One time, it was simply one of my co-workers saying the person was incredibly loud, no matter what his demeanor was, meaning, even if he was being nice, he could not control the volume of his voice - that and the fact that he always carried around a neck pillow, and a large quilt. Instantly, I knew who my co-worker was referring to. I mean seriously, I could bring along a camcorder with me to work for 2 or so months, and have an interesting story to tell. From the assortment of posters we have tacked to the walls to make the place "homey"-to- the oddest part of this room; how, some days during the summer we are stuffy as hell and so damn hot up here, and then the next day, freezing cold...I can almost state that I like my job...
No comments:
Post a Comment